Socialising

Over the past week or so I’ve been working to really fill out the game
AI and simulation. We now keep a reasonably lengthy history of each player’s
activity, so you can inspect them and see what they’ve been up to in the past,
not just where they are right this moment.

Please excuse the placeholder programmer-art building models; am currently
waiting for proper ones!

The path taken by new one user

Similarly, I’m now adding real AI for working out how players feel about other
people and objects within the simulation. When socialising with other players,
they now engage in miniature social interactions with each of the other people
in their social circle, and can sometimes react to them.

Some simple social interactions

For the sake of ease-of-use, you can not only look at a player’s thoughts about
others, but there’s a separate tab for showing you other people’s thoughts
about them. You just might want to look to see how popular someone is, before
deciding to ban them!

I haven’t yet decided precisely how someone’s popularity within the community
should influence the simulation when they’re banned. Maybe it’s enough that
a popular person simply isn’t there any more to lift other people up? Or that
an unpopular person isn’t there to annoy everyone any more? Or maybe there
should be the chance for a scandal which might attract media attention.. This
will need some tuning, I’m sure!

This system is still in its absolute infancy, but I think it’s already helping
to lend some personality to these individual characters!